505 assesment 1

For my Project I want to focus on a zombie setting.

compiling all of the needed footage.

after effects struggles to work with the Auckland footage I will use some other base footage.

It fails to track the footage

Its always great when Maya crashes and you have forgotten to save.
I have been using a free Suzuki Swift model I found on CGtrader.com
I had to retexure the entire model as I am Using Vray For smoke effects in Phoenix.
I am using hdri’s from hdrihaven.com

I was thinking about having this model in my first shot with Sarah dancing on top, with zombies moving towards the car. But I will probaly just make it for the second shot that will be static.

I have decided to have the car in the second shot although I added a breeze to the simulation which turned out giving the smoke the aprence of the car moving. Since the sim took over 9 hours I dont feel like going back and turning down the intesity of the breeze.
Once you get down the general operation of after effects it is pretty straightford.
I have also made a few objects 3d like the main charactor which at one point leaned further back than I wanted.
Also I made the water image a 3d element to get the same gradient as the base image.

the background image I used is heavly upscaled with removed people.
For the water it is a replicated image of water that is slightly moving using keyframing.
The main issue I am having is getting the shadows to work.
For every asset in this compesition I adjusted the red balance to get a silimar result to an action films color grading(grey/blue ish). I also added a drop shadow to the car and then I turned it into a 3d element in which I could angle it to the gradient on the background.

One other thing I would fix if I rendered the car again is that i would add an invisable floor so dont get smoke going under the tire.

using the green screne footage from school I found that we need better lighting mainly for the green screen as shadows are casted from the subject mean it is hard to get a clean cut.

the grainyness and lack of brightness difference between the background and the subject

compaired to the stock footage suplied by Neil, the subject is well lit as well as the background to give separation.

Assests in Video:
https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/car/luxury/swift
https://thespinoff.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/GettyImages-514846776-850×510.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaQfYosw0XM&t=96s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZIpFytCSVc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYgiLFRcW3A&t=9s
The video ended up being this short because my computer ran out of ram for the smoke sim.
Things that I did to finish the video was I added muzzle flash, film grain, zoomed in and out from the main charactor, cropped the footage to 21/9 aspect ratio and finaly added some sound effects like the COD zombies and the Bruh sound effect.

I also tried to seperate different elements to the cut in different layers of pre-comp. like the image of the pre-comp above was just for framing the video into the 21/9 apect ratio.

For the second video that I made took a while to come up with as all the footage I recorded around my house after effects struggled to track due to a low contrast and lack of trackable points, originally I was working on the video showen at the top of this post but after effects would even attempted to track it, I believe it had something to do with me slowing the footage down. So I decided to do a stationairy shot, this also ended up failing due to low contrast. But In the end I chose to use a M&M to track then added the tracking points to a null object which I made the parent to the hologram layers. This is separate from the first video.

Additional things I did was a horizonal glow to the subject, added color vibrance and lowered the opacity as well has keyframing the opacity to pulse with the solid layer that is ontop of the footage.

Green screen assests from Neil.

Assest:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJUl4CH4f-c&t=1731s

Green screen footage from school

For the light wraping I was going to use the zombie again until I realised it had hard shadows and this quick way of light wrapping doesnt look to great. Although once again it was pretty hard to work with this green screen footage as it was grainy and there wasnt that destinct separation between the subject and the screen. Other things I added were a lense flare behind the subject and finally film grain to finish it off.

One thing I learnt from working on this video was when rendering the video out through Media Encoder is to make sure If you are working with 1080p footage to upscale it to atleast 1440p to retain some of the original quality after Youtubes compression.

Next time I would add an adition layer of matte to add slight glow across the whole of the subject. Also I would increase the intensity of the the intial wrap.